On Monday 21st July, Mumsnet Founder and CEO Justine Roberts sat down with Peter Kyle to ask him Mumsnet users' questions.
Users were invited to submit their questions online ahead of the interview, and a selection of questions on the most popular topics were put to Peter.
Please credit Mumsnet when using.
TRANSCRIPT
JR: Well, thank you so much for agreeing to speak to us today. As you know, we're going to put Mumset users’ questions. We've had lots of interest on the thread. There are some obvious big topics, which I'm sure you were expecting, but we'll get straight in and I'll ask away. So these are user questions and I’m going to put them to you..
So lots of our users are really concerned about kids and smartphones and social media and the effects that it's having. And this is a typical question from Mumsnetter:
Teens are spending 35 hours a week on smartphones and mental health stats among this cohort are shocking. I believe these things are related. Teens report feeling relieved when their devices are taken away and the only winners are the companies making the addictive apps and games designed to keep you scrolling. So why isn't the British government prioritising its people over big tech and making decisive moves like other governments, for example, Australia, where they have banned social media for under 16s?
PK: Okay, so this government is acting, and we are putting the interests of children ahead of that of big tech. Believe me, we are. We just have to do it in a way that is appropriate and actually delivers the change that we want to see. I totally understand why parents are at their wits end. I'm not a parent, and I have to be upfront about that at the outset, but I've spoken to enough parents who are experiencing the daily nightmare of having rows with kids because they need to take these phones out of their hands at bedtime, so they can study and all these sorts of things. Inappropriate content is coming into their feeds. I've now met so many children and parents who have experienced horiffic content making their way into their feeds. So we are acting on this. So early this year, illegal content must be removed from platforms, things like suicide forums, which should never have existed in the first place, are now unable to be viewed by anybody in this country. And now this week is a big week for our country, because we're now moving forward to a point where age has to be verified before content can be supplied to children under 18. Under 13s should not be able to access social media. So this will be the biggest step forward for a young person's experience online since the internet was created, and I want to apologise to any kid who's over 13 who has not had any of these protections, to parents who have strived and failed to keep their kids free from all this content because we have let them down. We are taking a big step forward, and I think maybe a bit later in the conversation, I'll talk to where I see things going forward after this big step.
JR: I think users on Mumsnet will be very happy with what's coming in, but I think it doesn't address the addictive by design thing. There's quite a lot of concern about why the Safer Phones Bill, why did you water it down? So Twisty Izzy says, why, when all the research shows the damage they do, why did you vote to water down the Safer Phones Bill?
PK: Well I didn’t vote… So because I have a pathway towards delivering what I believe will be a much healthier experience for children online. So we’ve had illegal content coming down from earlier this year, we have age appropriate content being fed to children. And the consequence for not doing so is a whole set of measures that Ofcome now have which are the most powerful in the world. These will be big steps forward. A lot of the evidence people point to, and we say things like, you know, all the evidence suggests and parents have had such a horrific experience in their circumstance, I understand why many of them would want these phones just taken out. That's because parents don't believe there is an alternative anymore, because it's been a Wild West for so long. People are at their wits end, and they just say, just take this kit out of their hands. Parents also want to know where their kids are, and they use phones to monitor where kids are. They also want kids to be able to have travel passes that are on their phones, to have gym passes that are on their phones to pay for things using the wallets that are on their phones. They want to be able to speak to their kids, particularly if their kids are anxious about something, or they want to make sure that there is something about in their family that they can adapt to. So there's lots of reasons why parents also want phones to be in kids' hands. Kids themselves overwhelmingly say make us safer online, prevent us from seeing things we shouldn't be seeing. But please don't take the phones out of us because also, there's a lot of benefits to it. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was in Leicester meeting kids, and one of the kids there was playing an instrument that was not widely used in the classroom and in school, she was practicing with kids from lots of other places, because they practice together online, because there’s not enough kids in their own community. There's a lot of real benefits of these things. So I'm happy to talk a bit more about the addictive stuff and all the rest of it. But countries that are taking the phones or moving towards it out of the kids hands, they're having a lot of difficulties. Who do you criminalise because if you're talking about making a law to ban them, are you criminalising the children for holding them, the parents for buying them, the schools for allowing them in there? Because you're talking about a very, very strident step forward. I think there's things we can do that are steps along the way that would make a very meaningful difference to kids' experience and parents and family life without having to ban outright. And I think we should explore those before we move to a ban.
JR: Maybe moving on to one of those Mumsnet user GabhMoLeithsceal says: Hi Peter, thanks for taking our questions. Is there any intention to introduce age verification measures that actually work across social media platforms? Parental controls are helpful, but kids can get around them easily and they’re dependent on parents understanding them in the first place, which not all do. Just by way of an aside 93% of our users are in favour of raising the digital age consent to 16 so why wouldn’t you do that?
PK: Well, firstly, don't thank me for being here. I just want to thank you for inviting me to speak and meet with the Mumsnet members - it really is a privilege of a lifetime. So when it comes to age verification, the law is now very clear from this week that platforms have got to verify the age using a technology that is appropriate for the technology they are deploying to deliver their content. So it would be different for each of the platforms. Now, Ofcom, they have the powers to assess whether the technology they are using is not just appropriate, but is to the maximum that they could be using. If not, they fall foul of the law. There's a lot more we can do about this. Each platform has, the technology is maturing. It's not 100% yet, but it will make a very big difference. Some people will link it to existing ID cards. Others will use age verification techniques, which are becoming much more accurate, but there's a whole suite of measures, if they are not using the right measures and the maximum, maximum measures, Ofcom will step in, and they will face heavy fines. With regards to digital age of consent, at the moment it's 13. If I lifted it to 16, all it will require is one tick box to say that you're 16. So you know it would be, it will be quite easy to go in and get around…
JR: Am I right in thinking most of Europe has a 16?
PK: This is true. So the question, the question for me is, what age should children be allowed to be online and have access to social media, rather than the digital age of consent? I can pass the law, as I have that says that no child under 13 should have access to social media if you are having it from 13 up it has to be age appropriate from 13 up. So no child under 18 should have access to porn for example. No child under 13 should have violent misogyny coming into their feed and, you know, in such an unfettered way, at all, so these are the big steps that we're taking forward. I don't think digital age of consent would deliver the step change that I think people think it would…
JR: Would it not deliver, though - and this is a question from Sarahhasablackcat, would it not deliver the inability to be addicted by design?
PK: That is something I am deeply concerned about. Now, the compulsive, some would say, addictive nature of some of the apps and some of the usage of the apps. And look, I need to be really clear at the outset, each child has a different interaction with different apps in different ways. We also think that kids from different backgrounds are having a different impact, a different relationship with different apps. So it isn't just one relationship with all of the different apps simultaneously, and if I'm going to pass laws and regulations, I need to be really specific about the impact it's going to have on children from different backgrounds and so forth. So where there is behaviour which is driving compulsive behaviour, where kids sometimes feel they're not in control, this is something I am very focused on. I've designed in government, and been thinking about it from opposition, about what measures I could bring in that would empower parents and empower children over their own use of these apps. This is something I'll be talking about in the coming period after these measures have come online in the next week or so.
JR: Okay, I mean, I don't want to labour it too much more, but normally companies that design products for kids have to prove it's safe before they put it in the market, and somehow or other, we seem to be in a situation where we're trying to prove that it causes harm. And there's a question from PithyZebra on this, which said Chris Whitty was going to be commissioned to report on this, and what's actually happened to that report, and when do you expect him to conclude it?
PK: I just simply couldn't agree more. I mean, really, the biggest frustration I've had in this job is that the tech companies aren't themselves, providing the evidence about the impact their products are having on society and on children in particular. The week I came into this job, I've commissioned, I spent a lot of money commissioning independent, verifiable, peer reviewed evidence, in a granular nature, about the impact that social media is having on kids and smartphone is smartphones are having on children, but again, it has to look at the causal relationships and children’s different backgrounds, because it is actually more complicated and more diverse and granular. I'm willing to use all of the power that I have as a Secretary of State and that Parliament can have in order to keep kids safe but also to incentivise more healthy behaviour. We have to do so with full knowledge and evidence behind it, as well. With Chris Whitty and a whole bunch of other reports are incoming. But I'm not going to wait for all these reports to come in, because I think I now have enough evidence from the year we've been in government to start releasing packages, which will start moving from always talking about safety, because we're nailing down on safety, and certainly I'll be nailing down harder on age verification into the future. I think we can have a national conversation about what a healthy childhood looks like online. We do it offline all the time. Parents set curfews and diet and exercise as part of the language and the vocabulary within families. We haven't had that national debate about what health looks like and a healthy childhood looks like online yet. That is something that I've been doing very much from the position of government, and I want to have a much more public debate about it.
JR: So you'll come back to us on that?
PK: I'll come back to you really soon. I mean, I'm not talking about spending a lot of time on this. I want to get cracking on some of this stuff. Again, a lot of conversations are going on between me and the Prime Minister and others at the moment about how we can do that.
JR: Brilliant. So smartphones in school. Newtsance says there's lots of evidence to suggest that kids' experience of school is much better when smartphones are properly banned and/or locked away during the school day. Why not have this as a national policy?
PK: It is a national policy. So the national guidance from the Department for Education is that smartphones should not be routinely used in schools, and that each school must use their own method, which is appropriate for their own school and cohort of children…
JR: And I think that’s where she’s getting at it, rather than allowing the school to come up with their version. There is evidence that you allow the ‘don’t see don’t hear’ policy and they get used a lot still. And I think if you actually insist that the phone is put away at the beginning of school and not taken out til the end it has a much healthier effect. So that's what we're, I think that's what this question is getting at.
PK: I hear you loud and clear. We are not adopting a don't hear, you know, don't see, don't hear, approach to this. Smartphones should not be used routinely in schools. Now, there might be some classes where you, they are brought in because of a specific purpose in the class, but that has to be determined, and it should be the exception, not the norm. But look, we allow schools freedom to teach according to their own cohort, their own school community, in lots of different areas. There is effects within it. People who are running schools must be able to run their schools in a way that's appropriate for the student body and the school community that they have. We are insistent that there should not be smartphones in schools, whether they use pouches, whether they use lockers, whether they tell kids they should leave them at home. That is down to the school community, but they must impose it in a way that keeps smartphones out of the schools.
JR: Our research shows that’s not working…I’m happy to share that with you….
PK: Well, what we will, we care very deeply about this. Now I'm often asked to pass a law about it, because that's the alternative. Who do you criminalise if you pass a law, you know, do you literally say a child is a criminal for having a phone, the parent for allowing the phone to come to school or the school, the teachers for allowing it to get into the school. It is a big step to pass a law that says children shouldn't have phones on schools. And there are some kids, because then you start with all the exceptions, because some kids have smartphones with apps which are linked to health reasons. There's lots of other reasons. As I say, parents do want their kids to have, on the whole, they want to have phones on the way to and from school; they just don't want it being used at school. And I'm very, very attuned to the fact that kids should not be distracted by schools, I hope people look at me, by phones in schools. I hope you will see my words, my actions, about how strongly I feel about this. If there is routinely schools which are flouting this or not taking it seriously enough, because our own evidence says that 97% of schools are preventing schools getting in, are taking action on this. If we need to nail down hard on it, we will nail down hard on it. But please think very carefully about asking politicians to pass a law which criminalises by definition, because if you pass a law that doesn't criminalise its not a law that means anything.
JR: We're happy to share our findings as well.
PK: Please do.
JR: Okay, so moving on to the rapid evolution of tech. 70sisters says it's been suggested that the new children's online safety codes coming into force are already out of date because they don't cover things like AI chatbots. When tech is evolving so rapidly, how can policy and legislation possibly keep up? Do you think we need to act with more urgency? The Online Safety Act has taken so long to get into place, and it feels like tech companies are always one step ahead.
PK: Okay, so I agree, and I need to clarify one bit of that. I agree that things are moving on really fast, and we do have to struggle to keep up to date with it. For too long, the Online Safety debate has always been the tech companies innovate, they deploy without proving safety, and then it is government and families, parents who pick up the pieces. That cannot any longer, any longer be the case. The thing I'll just pick your member up on, is that the law is, is technology neutral. It doesn't, any any product, whether it is existing or is new, which is classed as social media, which is basically the ability to interact between people on it, is brought into scope of the Online Safety Act. That includes chatbots, and it includes AI that is being brought into integrated into social media apps, so most of the usages of AI that is currently out there is covered by the Act. I will no longer allow us to go through a process, a five year piece of legislation that takes two years to then get the consultations done and for it to be implemented. I make this guarantee to Mumsnet members, because it's just it has sold a whole generation of children downstream, a whole generation of kids who are over the age of 13 deserve our apology because they have been exposed to torrid toxic material too long. We can't allow that to happen again. So the measures that I've been looking at, thinking about into the future are things that I believe we can do very rapidly. We have to do broad laws that take into scope new developments. Regulators have to have the flexibility to act when it's when it's technology neutral. So it always is what the technology does, rather than technology itself, which we are passing the laws on at the moment, and we find a way from Parliament to get much more regularly consulted over keeping things up to date. You can't just have these big moments in Parliament every five years, seven years, 10 years, because that's not fit for the moment we're living in.
JR: Understood. And moving on to the thorny issue of AI and copyright, ForAzureCat says why does the government seem so determined to let massive tech companies rip off artists and creators and use their content for free to train their AI models?
PK: I don't, I want to stop it. I categorically want to stop that happening. But let's just be really clear about what the debate is. Because I consulted and I wanted to bring in a piece of legislation, I was forced because somebody tabled an amendment on another piece of legislation that didn't mention AI or copyright to have a one sided debate on this. The debate is never about creative people wanting to protect their goods and me wanting to give it to AI. I believe that there is a way forward that can better protect creative content into the digital age than what other people have been suggesting. So what at the moment, I have a whole series of working groups which is bringing together the AI sector and the creative sector. I've already met with them now several times, parliamentarians, the creatives, last week Lisa Nandy and I jointly chaired one of the task forces with both sides there. We are agreeing a set of principles, and then I hope to move forward with those principles that we agree together and then legislate on the back of it. But I need to be really clear about something. All of these things that people are upset about, about AI, sucking in and using creative content without respect to copyright, have happened from abroad. None of it has happened within Britain, and that's posing a real challenge for legislators. So it is the models are being trained in California and now increasingly in Gulf States that don't recognize overall British copyright unless it's internationally copyrighted. And it means that the court system in the UK is often not able to hold to account the people who've been using it. That is why, simply there aren't more court cases from British creatives, because you need to go and litigate elsewhere, and it's very, very expensive to do it. The cases that are outstanding have usually been outstanding for up to three years. It's just not fit for purpose. So I am open to legislating. I need to be guided, rather than imposing on the sector. I need to be guided by what creatives tell me and what AI companies say they need in order to have access. But this has to come as a solution from both. I'll just say one thing, we have the second largest creative sector in the world. We've got the third largest AI market in the world. Both of these sectors are, are crucial to economic prosperity, national security and defence and our ability to flourish and provide great jobs into the future. Both of them are. It is a credit to our economy we have both of these sectors at the top of our economy, only one other country does, and that's America. So this is an opportunity to get something right, but I promise you, what I'm trying to do is find a way for creatives to be remunerated in the digital age, for creatives to have protections in the digital age, but if we carry on as we are, then we're in a position where we are disempowered from what happens abroad. If we can have the AI companies here operating here with certainty in law, respecting copyright, then British law will be adhered to, and then creators will be empowered.
JR: Okay, I have to declare a Mumsnet interest here, because we have an open suit against OpenAI who scraped large quantities of our content and the problem, can I say, from a small business publisher, is we simply can't afford the six years of lawsuit that they will happily go through with. So when you're thinking about making the law fit for purpose, can you please think about small creators and small publishers who who up against the might of big tech who can't afford justice?
PK: Believe me, if you look at what I’ve said on the floor of the House of Commons, what I've said repeatedly in interviews, this is what I am concerned of. I have a lot of people who are big representation from publishing houses, and they have, they have the kind of deep pockets where they can take this kind of litigation and go to court, often internationally.
But in my mind, there's always this guy in Hove called Pauly the Painter, and I have two of his paintings in my office next door here, and he stands on the street corner and paints beautiful paintings of the community I live in, and he puts his content onto Instagram, and that's how he sells all of his stuff. Now that's all gone, that will be used by the AI companies. He is always in my mind. He's a visualisation of what I need to achieve, because there will be big licensing agreements already being struck. They need to be able to continue, but we have to have a system that respects small creators and community based creators and small businesses like your own, so that they are empowered and have the ability to hold to account but also be remunerated, have their content respected and feel that they have agency in the digital age. If we get it right, the companies will be here and be able to be held to account using British courts. If we get it wrong, they will stay abroad, and they will take the material from abroad, and we will lose all agency in this and I do not want that to happen. That's why I'm fighting so hard to stop this happening. I want to see if I can solve this problem by changing the law as quickly as I possibly can.
JR: Fantastic. So I think, I think I know what you’re going to say to this…
PK: Am I becoming predictable?
JR: Twogirls says do you think the big tech firms can afford to pay for the words they’re scraping to build and maintain their models? I just read that Meta are paying AI researchers 100 million dollar sign on bonuses and OpenAI is valued at 300 billion. What makes you think they should be able to ignore our copyright laws and lift whatever they like? Surely they can pay to licence it. Will you be encouraging a licensing system?
PK: As I just said, yes, I’ve already said that I want licensing to become the norm for those who want it. Licensing is usually done on bulk by publishers and representative bodies of different creatives. But also we need to also, I'm looking at whether we can have a way of small creators having a system in which they can put their content into it and be remunerated and have their, have it negotiated on their hands using the latest technology.
JR: How long’s that gonna take to…?
PK: Listen, this is, this is, nothing has more of my time than this issue right now. It needs resolving. It needs resolving rapidly, but also let me just say something else. What I'm not forcing on the creatives or the AI company, what I need, one of the things I need to get to the bottom of is what triggers remuneration in the digital age, whether that is scraping, whether it's using, whether it's some, some other way, because AI consumes information and produces new content in a very different way than we've ever experienced before. And these are the things we, that I am open minded, but I believe we can bring the AI sector together with the creative sector to find a way forward for it, because as I say this scraping is not happening in the UK it’s happening elsewhere.
JR: Well in our case it was… Alright, so then we're going to move on, because there's other subjects. So energy use, I mean, we're sticking with AI and energy use. GasperyJacquesRoberts says, I understand the government is looking to increase the UK's compute capability by at least 20 times by 2030 to keep pace with AI. But where is the power for this going to come from? Renewable energy sources are great, but they're inconstant, which is not good for huge data centres. Nuclear power is potentially much better as it's more stable, but it's staggeringly expensive, it takes decades to come online. Where are these gigawatts of power ging to come from??
PK: So there's a short, medium and a long term challenge that we face. I've created a programme of AI growth zones. This is areas of the country where we have an excess of electricity supply.
We have a problem overall with energy constraint as a country. But it's not evenly distributed. There's parts, particularly in London, where there's energy constraints, other parts where there's energy surplus. So where there's parts of the country, where we have energy surplus already, quick connection to the grid, and a planning authority that really wants data centres in their area, then we will act in the short term to use that opportunity. For the medium to long term I set up the AI Energy Council with Ed Miliband bringing together the AI sector and the energy sector, including OFGEM and the chief executive of the National Grid, and we are strategically planning for the energy needs into the future. If we don't get this right, then British data for the economy and public services will go offshore to be processed, and that is not good for our sovereignty and security. So we need to get this right for lots of reasons, and also we're missing out on all the opportunity that goes with it. We've just given a billion pounds to Rolls Royce to get small modular reactors off the ground, off the ground, and drawing board and into our economy as quickly as possible to complement the big nuclear reactors. One's coming online, we're just commissioning another one for the long term. But the long term is important in all this as well, and none of this will knock us off our target of getting to net zero or clean energy superpower by 2030 status. We want to get to well over 95% of our energy being being produced. This isn't ideological, because these energy companies, AI companies and tech companies, they have their own net zero ambitions as well. If we can get to net zero, if we can get clean energy and we can increase our AI infrastructure simultaneously it makes us an incredibly important place and a very desirable place to invest in. So there's so many reasons why we need to get this right, and if we can get that infrastructure in there, then the jobs that will flow from it, the wealth and prosperity will flow from it and us as a UK Government using all of our energy and agency to make sure it's deployed safely, and that we don't leave any person and any community behind will leave us front of this next industrial revolution, as we were at the first one.
JR: Okay, another follow up on that would be NorthLondonMum who says and where will all the water come from to keep them cool? Liverpool, one of the wettest parts in the country, is in drought for the first time in 40 years - after a new data centre has been built there. How will you monitor and minimise water use by data centres?
PK: Well, the energy, the data centre in Liverpool isn’t responsible for that drought. We need to get much better at managing our water. We are building, we are having the biggest expansion of our reservoirs for well over several generations in our country right now. As you've seen just this week, Steve Reed the Environment Secretary has made a series of announcements to hold the water companies to account for their lack of investment in recent years and unlock investment going forward. Data centres aren’t all cooled by water. They're also cooled by air, some of them, and we're looking very carefully, again, at the strategic needs of data centres, as we go forward, but the heat that comes off of the data centres can also be put to good for economic and societal use in the areas that we have. The AI growth zones, which I mentioned before, these are going to be parts of the country because we have agency as a government, and this government chooses to prioritise parts of the country that have been left behind by previous waves of industrial change, and some of the uses for heat, could be community heating, you can have new swimming pools heated by it. There's one community that's thinking about new agricultural purposes, where you can have greenhouses heated by the heat that comes off of it. All of these things could be of real benefit to the communities. And we're looking at all these opportunities because we want every community to benefit to the maximum from the infrastructure that’s coming down the line.
JR: And you’re not worried about water shortages?
PK: I'm worried about a lot of things, but I'm only anxious if we're not planning for it. We're planning for water to get it right, we're planning for energy to get it right. But we also have the scale of ambition for building out our digital infrastructure, both the sovereign compute power for which we heard about earlier with the 20 fold by 2030 and the broad data centre use across the UK, where we'll have some of the biggest data centres in the whole of the world stationed here so that we can track the industry here that abide to our laws, it will make sure that we can do things like AI copyright and resolve that and also have a huge advancement for the use of data domestically to create jobs, scientific medical progress, which is going to keep Britain at the forefront of the next set of opportunities.
JR: I mean, you sound really excited by the, what AI can bring, but I have to say, a couple of our users’ questions sort of reveal a kind of different anxiety about AI. And Goonies77 says: as a working mum, I'm currently watching out, watching the rapid rollout of AI in my workplace. I think in the next one to two years, I will be replaced by AI. Has any thought been given to the impact this will have on families and when we have mass employment, our human skills are becoming redundant? Companies seem to be allowed free will to just get rid of people for machines. What jobs will there be for our kids?
PK: Firstly, your members have the most amazing names, so credit to them for that.. I think that the point that she raises is an incredibly important one. She asks if I'm considering it. Yes, I am. And yes, the Prime Minister is. Just at a recent cabinet, I did a presentation on this exact issue. We're doing a lot of work on it. I need to be really blunt about this. We cannot stop AI from coming into our country. It is gonna come, but we have agency as a government as to how it unfolds, who it impacts, how we prepare people and our economy for it, so that we can be prepared for the future. I am unfolding, I'm now responsible for delivering a tech first set of training schemes, that's a million students are going to be trained, 7.5 million people out there in the broad economy. I'm really worried that people won't have the essential skills to adapt with it. With every single wave of industrial change that we've had, jobs have been created. You can't often predict what some of the jobs that are gonna be created are. So therefore, if you have the skills and those foundational skills in what AI is, how it works and how it benefits you, then people will be very well prepared to adapt to the to the opportunities that will come, as well as the challenges. And if you feel prepared, you will have a lot less anxiety. If I could just say one fact that will help you understand this a bit better. 60% of the jobs in our economy today didn't exist 50 years ago. Now, the same process is now unfolding at a more rapid rate. It's not going to take, as your member said, it's going to take a few years, rather than 50, to start experiencing quite big changes in our economy as a result. Some of those jobs that are going to be created, if you said, well, the social media influencer years ago, but also things like event catering didn't exist 50 years ago. There's a lot of jobs in our economy that have flown from the waves of change that we've had, the industrialisation, digital change, computers and so forth, personal computing. The same will happen. Now the over 35s are using AI at double the rate of over 55s but to close that gap takes just two and a half hours of training. AI is a powerful tool, but it's a much more accessible tool than people have had in the past. So I don't want to I am enthusiastic, I am positive, because I believe Britain can ride this wave to the benefit of every person and every community in our country, but we do need to get it right. So the worry and the anxiety I have is channeled into making sure we get it right as a country, and that everybody, particularly the people who are already experiencing, seeing what's coming, that they get the support they need, the adaptation, the skills the training they need so they feel confident about the future and not full of worry.
JR: And a more philosophical question on this from Pandamonimums, how do we make sure it doesn't just end up making regular people poorer, while billionaires cream off yet more profit from the efficiencies they've made?
PK: Because you've got a government and you have a Secretary of State that is very mindful of this. That has embraced this very, very thought from the moment that I was appointed as Shadow Secretary of State, not just waiting til I became Secretary of State. When you see the announcements that I'll be making in the coming period about where the digital infrastructure for the AI revolution is going to be placed, you will see instantly what I mean by using the power of government to make sure that communities that have been left behind are taken right to the front of the queue in this one because we can make choices as a government. And I am determined that when I have these discussions with big tech, when I have these discussions with British tech, that the voices of the people that you are concerned about are right there in the room, and the decisions I make shape the direction of travel for AI. We do not sit back ever and just allow AI to wash over our country in any way it sees fit, we will use the power of government to shape it.
JR: Okay I’m getting the wind up so I'm going to ask one final question, then maybe just a very quickie but Palermon: how do you think your government has done in the last year? What can Labour do to combat the rise of Reform and are you expecting to be reshuffled soon?
PK: Well, I'll start at the end there. I have never predicted a reshuffle correctly since I was appointed to the front bench. So I have one thing in life. I had a difficult time through education myself. I left school with no usable qualifications. I had to apply four times to get into university. I had to go back to secondary school when I was 25 years old and start all over again sitting in a class with 16 year olds. So I know it's like to struggle a bit through life, and had to overcome barriers. I was diagnosed with very profound dyslexia later in life. So I have learned that if I give 100% to what's in front of me, then the future will take care of itself, and whether it comes to reshuffles or not, if I think about that, then I'm thinking about something that's distracting me from doing all the things I've said that I would. When it comes to this government, we inherited a really difficult set of circumstances, and what you have seen is very decent, hard working people who are trying their absolute best to correct the mistakes that we inherited, to fix the fundamentals of our country, our broken public services, our reputation around the world, right through to our economy, which has some structural challenges in it with high tax and low growth that cannot persist forever. We have to break that cycle. And you've seen people being honest when we get things wrong and determined to deliver for everyone in this country, and I think that is something that we should celebrate, even though I realise that we have to deliver changes that people feel in their pocket and too often, the big changes that we've made haven’t been felt in people's pockets yet. But believe me, that is what we are trying so hard to deliver.
JR: Okay, well, I'm just going to give you a bit of a hint here. More than half of the users on Mumsnet, parents said they would be more likely to vote for a political party that committed to implementing a social media ban [for under 16s] I’ll leave that one with you. So finally, it's a Mumsnet interview. So we've brought along your boss’s favourite biscuits, Keir Starmer’s chocolate digestives. But I have to ask you, what is yours? So I think you’re gonna tell me a protein bar or something.
PK: So I have in my desk boxes of protein bars that keep me going and nuts. But if you ask my favourite biscuit, it would be a Bourbon. But I was recently, actually, a little while ago, I went to meet with the head principal of a local secondary school and she had Club biscuits on this plate. And it just took me straight back to my childhood, where my mum used to put Club biscuits of which my favourite...
JR: Orange or mint?
PK: mint, no, no, mint was my favourite. And I said to her, when I saw them, I just had this sort of wave of nostalgia. And the next time I went to a meeting with her which was a little while ago she gave me a whole packet of these Club biscuits
JR: I can’t help but think of that jingle but I won’t sing it… That’s been a great pleasure, thank you so much for your time.